Large Hadron Collider

Has anyone been following the progress of the CERN Large Hadron Collider project in Switzerland?

Is the end nigh?
I don't think so, although some do.

Most interesting stuff.
They're gearing up for the first high-energy testing at the moment.
I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with, over the next 10 years or so.
A lot of our future science and technology could well be based on the long-term results of this project.

Their News page provides updates on progress every week or two. I've been following closely for a year or two.

The scale of this project is amazing:-

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva.

Click to expand...

The aim:-

To smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang. The LHC experiments try and work out what happened.

Oh yeah, that's a project i've been following for quite some time - sensational bit of equipment that's getting ever closer to Startrek technology, or at least understanding principles of physics outside of our current understanding.

Although there are doom sayers harking the end of the world when it goes into it's first full power-up test, the realities of the situation are that of no more energy than 14 mosquitoes travelling at their maximum flight velocities busting their guts to fly flat out in the name of glory, going head first into a brick wall.

In the case of the LHC the big news is that the energy released at the impact point will be the equivalent of 14 mosquitoes having a head on collision (7 mosquitoes going one way and 7 mosquitoes going the other way); splattering themselves to bits, albeit concentrated into an area the size of a few atoms.

Putting that scenario into perspective, it's going to be one he!! of a bang, at the atomic level.

Huge amounts of power are absorbed in funneling staggering levels of current into the electro-magnets to contain and constrain and accelerate target atoms on their collision path.

I love this stuff, a bit like the rail gun experiments during the Reganite era where Ronald Regan threw massive amounts of money towards Starwars research.
They got to 10 kilometers per second, although blowing rail guns to bits in the process - the video imagery of the projectile streaming a tail of fire behind it was truly impressive.

the realities of the situation are that of no more energy than 14 mosquitoes travelling at their maximum flight velocities busting their guts to fly flat out in the name of glory, going head first into a brick wall.

Huge amounts of power are absorbed in funneling staggering levels of current into the electro-magnets to contain and constrain and accelerate target atoms on their collision path.